The Secret Token Page 4

  The Spanish monarch’s luck changed dramatically in 1580. The sultan, embroiled in an expensive war with Persia and facing galloping inflation at home, agreed on a truce that would hold for more than a century. This allowed Philip to turn his attention to rebellious Protestants in the Netherlands. Meanwhile, the Portuguese ruler vanished in a disastrous campaign in Morocco; Philip seized the opportunity and claimed the throne of his smaller neighbor that had its own extensive territories from Brazil to India. With this merger, he found himself at the helm of the largest and wealthiest empire in the history of the world, claiming nearly half of western Europe and all of the Americas as well as ample African and Asian territories. This was the first empire, not that of the British, on which it was said the sun never set. In the New World alone, more than 150,000 Spanish lived in some two hundred bustling cities scattered across the Caribbean basin, Mexico, and Peru. Another 200,000 or so African slaves cultivated their cash crops and did their menial tasks. Millions of Native inhabitants surrounded these growing centers of Spanish power, paying taxes and rents benefiting the new European elite that replaced their indigenous rulers.

  Aside from a few fishermen in Newfoundland and farmers in Brazil, there was not a single French or English village in the Western Hemisphere on the day that three hundred Spanish poets competed for a prize in Mexico City. Conquistadors had built forts in the Appalachian Mountains, while Jesuits had settled on the shores of Chesapeake Bay—albeit briefly. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, there was no reason to think that Philip’s steamroller wouldn’t continue to conquer and cajole its way across Europe while completing his project of dominating the New World. But Verrazano’s false promise and the ludicrous myth of Chicora soon fused with surprising, and to Spain disruptive, results.

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  Elizabeth’s cramped and gloomy England was a stark contrast to Philip’s gilded Spain. Squeezed between France, with fivefold its population, and a restive independent Scotland to the north, the country could claim only Ireland to the west as a foreign possession, an incessant flash point of conflict where soldiers and settlers clustered behind the protective ditches and fences surrounding the Dublin region. One Englishman at the time described his nation as “a weak, and poor state, destitute of means and friends.”

  The gulf between Elizabeth’s kingdom and other European nations was greater than the English Channel. Her father’s decision to declare his land Protestant in 1534 isolated it from a Europe still overwhelmingly Catholic. The Renaissance that began in Italy, with its remarkable advancements in science, technology, and art, arrived here in a belated and sporadic fashion. London was a vibrant capital, the second-largest city in Europe after Paris, but even by the standards of late medieval times the English as a whole were a xenophobic and superstitious lot. “They care little for foreigners, but scoff and laugh at them,” a German government official wrote of the capital’s citizens during a 1592 visit. He singled out the tradespeople who “seldom go to other countries” and added that street gangs viciously attacked foreigners “without regard to person.”

  King Philip II of Spain holds a rosary after his 1571 victory over a Turkish fleet; the same year, Virginia Algonquians massacred Spanish Jesuits in their mission on Chesapeake Bay.

  On the eve of Virginia’s settlement, England’s queen, Elizabeth I, carries a sieve in this 1583 portrait that associates her with the Roman vestal virgins.

  Navigation by instruments was considered a black art rather than a rational system, and math teachers might be mistaken for devil worshippers. “Books wherein appeared angles or mathematical diagrams were thought sufficient to be destroyed, because accounted popish, or diabolical, or both,” an English writer noted a century later. When the Italian friar and renowned scholar Giordano Bruno visited England’s intellectual center of Oxford in 1580, where offensive books had been burned in the town marketplace, he was stunned by the “obstinate ignorance, pedantry, and presumption” of the professors, whom he dismissed as “blind asses.” (Not that Italy was a freethinker’s paradise; Bruno himself was later burned at the stake in Rome’s marketplace for heresy.) Two of his English friends begged his sympathy. “Pity the poverty of this country,” they pleaded, “which is widowed of good learning in the fields of philosophy and pure mathematics.”

  England’s poverty stemmed from a brewing economic crisis and a fraying social fabric. The country’s traditional exports of tin and wool cloth suffered from rising competition and protectionism abroad. By fencing off land to graze more sheep, wealthy landowners forced small farmers into the filthy cities that already bred deadly epidemics. “These enclosures be the causes why rich men eat up a poor man as beasts do eat grass,” railed one critic in 1583. Yet the dissolution of the Catholic monasteries by Henry VIII had removed a welfare system of church-funded hospitals and almshouses that the English government had yet to replace.

  Elizabeth owned two thousand gloves, but her spectacular wardrobe couldn’t mask the nation’s destitution, from its bad roads to its woefully inadequate navy. Nor was her throne secure. Would-be assassins stalked her. She was shot at on her royal barge and attacked with a knife in a royal garden. “There are more than two hundred men of all ages who, at the instigation of the Jesuits, conspire to kill me,” she complained to the French ambassador in 1583. Mary, Queen of Scots, a staunch Catholic and sometime ally to Philip, was next in line for her job. Though imprisoned by Elizabeth, she was still capable of plotting against her cousin.

  England had taken an early lead in New World exploration. Nearly a century prior, when the country had just emerged from a long civil war, Elizabeth’s grandfather Henry VII sought to expand his realm’s commercial reach. Though he declined the plea made by Columbus’s brother to back the Italian’s plan to sail west to reach Asia in England’s name—one of history’s great what-ifs—he did support later American missions by Giovanni Caboto, also known as John Cabot, as well as Portuguese explorers and Bristol merchants. But his son and successor, Henry VIII, squandered that advantage by picking fights with the pope and the French and ignoring the likes of Verrazano.

  Henry’s daughter learned the hard way that the promise of quick New World riches could be illusory. In 1576, a young Yorkshire seaman named Martin Frobisher set off for China, intending to pass north of the Americas. Ice floes around Canada’s Baffin Island forced his return, but not before he picked up black stone that a specialist in England claimed contained gold. Elizabeth unwisely gave Frobisher a thousand pounds—nearly half a million dollars today—and a charter to form his Cathay Company. Other court officials also invested heavily in the venture.

  He set off on two major expeditions to establish a mining colony in the frozen north, but the tons of rock carried back to England turned out to be iron pyrite—fool’s gold. Instead of filling the queen’s treasury, the stone was used to pave a suburban London road in what was possibly the world’s most expensive flagstone. The financial fiasco turned Elizabeth and her court into skeptics of American schemes. Merchants got the message; they turned instead to new markets in Russia and the Middle East. But one eccentric figure at court continued to press for a more aggressive New World policy.

  Tall and rich, Sir Humphrey Gilbert was well versed in the new science of instrument navigation and deeply obsessed with finding a passage over the top of North America to China. He was also a soldier known for his violent outbursts and brutal tactics in neighboring Ireland. One of his methods was to line the path to his tent with the heads of slain Irish rebels. This brought “great terror to the people when they saw the heads of their dead fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolk, and friends,” according to one English observer.

  A week after Frobisher left on his second and last Baffin Island expedition, the queen granted Gilbert a charter to explore new lands and settle any place “not actually possessed of any Christian prince”—a warning not to tangle w
ith Spain’s colonies, though with no mention of how to handle natives already in possession of the land. Using his large family fortune, he quickly assembled a fleet with eleven ships and five hundred men and set out in the fall of 1578. Gilbert put his half brother in command of a small ship named the Falcon.

  At twenty-four, Walter Raleigh had a reputation as a libertine; his roommate in London affectionately called him “riotous, lascivious, and incontinent.” More than six feet tall, he towered over the average Elizabethan. Slim and handsome, with brown curly hair and pointed beard, he loved fashionable clothes and expensive jewels but came from minor and perpetually cash-strapped gentry in the western county of Devon. In the early 1570s, when not quite sixteen, Raleigh dropped out of Oxford to fight together with French Huguenots against rival Catholics; he might have first heard of the magical land of Chicora on the bloody battlefields of Reformation France.

  He had never been on the open sea. Gilbert assigned an experienced forty-year-old Portuguese pilot named Simão Fernandes as his navigator, likely with the task of showing the ropes to his impetuous half brother. Fernandes was a former pirate who barely escaped the executioner’s noose and was now intent on improving his social and financial lot in his new homeland.

  The fleet’s goal was kept secret to avoid detection by the Spanish, though Philip’s ambassador in London promptly warned the king that the destination was somewhere in the New World. His specific concern was the presence of the Portuguese pilot, “a thorough-paced scoundrel” who could reveal to the English details of the American coastline, “which he knows very well.” From this we know that Fernandes had been in the service of Spain and had extensive experience in the Americas, which made him nearly unique in Tudor England.

  Gilbert presumably intended to find the fabled Northwest Passage over North America, but his mission quickly descended into chaos, “frustrated by the usual Elizabethan blend of storms, mischance, quarrels with a second-in-command and desertions,” according to one Raleigh biography. All the ships turned back soon after leaving port, save the Falcon, which instead of sailing west sped south to the Cape Verde Islands off the African coast. The islands were a common stopping place for Portuguese ships carrying African slaves and gold or Asian pepper. This was, as Fernandes knew, an ideal spot for pirating.

  “Desirous to do somewhat worthy of honor, [Raleigh] took his course to the West Indies,” a contemporary notes. Short of provisions, however, the young man and his crew returned, limping back to England after “many dangerous adventures, as well as tempests as fights on the sea.” Some of the sailors apparently died or were killed in a battle with a Spanish vessel, and the Falcon was a shambles when it docked at Plymouth in May 1579.

  The country’s governing body, the Privy Council, grounded Raleigh, who had learned that the Atlantic Ocean made him seasick. “Man may not expect the ease of many cabins and safety at once in sea-service,” he wrote later, adding that ships were “but sluttish dens that breed sickness.” But he also learned that pirating could make him rich and famous. “He that commands the sea, commands the trade, and he that is lord of the trade of the world [is] lord of the wealth of the world,” he later noted. In addition, six months on the ocean cemented a bond between the courtier and the pilot; Raleigh’s ambition and status combined with Fernandes’s experience would make a potent pairing in the decade to come.

  Though Raleigh subsequently landed in prison twice, once for dueling with a knight and then for exchanging punches with a rival on the Westminster tennis court, his reputation at court grew. Despite (or because of) his brashness, the queen appointed him her chief bodyguard, an unpaid but important position for a monarch threatened regularly with assassination.

  An uprising in Ireland backed by Philip and the pope prompted her to send Raleigh to assist in battling the threat. His superiors ordered him to oversee the massacre of more than five hundred prisoners, including women and children, which he accomplished with murderous efficiency. Meanwhile, Fernandes took a small ship named the Squirrel on a reconnaissance mission for Gilbert to the North American coast and returned within three months, an amazing feat of seamanship. He might have passed by the Outer Banks during the course of the voyage.

  Meanwhile, undeterred by his previous failure, the single-minded Gilbert planned another New World voyage in 1583. By this time the queen had taken to young Raleigh and forbade him to leave her side. She noted that the enthusiastic Gilbert “was a man noted of not good happ by sea”—that is, plagued by misfortune—and didn’t trust him to bring her dashing Devon man back safely. (Despite his knowledge of instruments, Gilbert had found himself lost off the English coast more than once.) Occupied with another mission, Fernandes didn’t take part in the voyage either, to his good fortune.

  Gilbert’s final adventure was part farce and part tragedy. He arrived in Newfoundland’s St. John’s Harbour to take possession of the land for the queen and to levy taxes, much to the amusement of the rough fishing crews from many nations that regularly gathered there each summer and cared little for royal charters. Storms subsequently sank many of his ships, and Gilbert drowned in a September 1583 storm off the Azores while trying to return to England. In his final hours, he was said to have sat theatrically on the stern of the Squirrel—possibly the same tiny ship Fernandes had sailed three years before—while, according to legend, reading from Sir Thomas More’s Utopia. “Gilbert’s scheme was wrecked by his own impatient, unstable, and perverse nature,” writes Tudor scholar J. B. Black.

  This dramatic death left the field of New World exploration open to a younger generation with fresh ideas. As Gilbert’s ship went under in the Atlantic, a thirty-year-old Protestant pastor named Richard Hakluyt was crossing the English Channel to serve as chaplain and secretary to the English ambassador in Paris. This quiet and studious man would play the central role in creating what historian Peter Mancall refers to as “the language and logic that would guide the English colonization of North America.”

  His father dealt in skins and furs but died when the boy was five. He might have been named for his older cousin who subsequently became his guardian and mentor. This elder Richard Hakluyt collected maps and merchants’ stories and likely sent his young namesake to the Westminster School, a short walk from the queen’s palace. When the young man was sixteen, he had a road-to-Damascus conversion when looking at his guardian’s maps and saw a vast world waiting to be explored, redeemed, and exploited. He went on to graduate from Oxford and became an Anglican minister but held tight to his vision. Still in his twenties, he compiled a book of reports from European voyages to the New World, most of which were unknown in England.

  “There is a mighty large old map in parchment, made, as it should seem, by Verrazano,” he wrote two years later. The chart “traced all along the coast from Florida to Cape Briton with many Italian names, which layeth out the sea making a little neck of land.” He also noted “an old excellent globe in the queen’s private gallery at Westminster, which also seems to be of Verrazano’s making,” marking “the very self same strait neck of land…as it doth on Panama.”

  Hakluyt’s 1582 book includes a map of the Americas based on Verrazano’s data, in which the Pacific Ocean swoops through the area occupied, we now know, by the Pacific Northwest, Rocky Mountains, and Great Plains. As a result, the hefty girth of North America is portrayed instead as a tiny wasp waist, with Florida below the tightly cinched belt and Canada above it. Hakluyt’s excitement grew as he realized that if England could colonize and control this strategic area, this Panama of the North, then it could dominate trade between East and West.

  In Paris, he loitered in sailors’ pubs and chatted up scholars, buttonholing diplomats from many nations to pump them for information on the wider world, including “five or six of the best captains and pilots, one of whom was born in East India” and a Spaniard just back from Japan. Much of this intelligence was considered classified by Philip, who issued
strict orders that maps and descriptions of New World ports and trade routes not fall into the wrong hands. Hakluyt was, in other words, a spy, and he was working for one of the era’s great spymasters.

  In January 1584, he wrote impatiently to his boss, Secretary of State Francis Walsingham, that the opportunity to settle the Verrazano Isthmus would “wax cold and fall to the ground” without swift action. Building a colony could also, he argued, “stay the Spanish king from flowing all over the face” of North America. Nor was he content to remain behind. “I am most willing to go now,” he added bravely. While appreciating his enthusiasm, Walsingham kept the pastor busy in Paris.

  The Sea of Verrazano covers much of North America and laps just to the west of the Atlantic in this map of North America published by Richard Hakluyt in 1582.

  Hakluyt envisioned more than a stopping place to transship goods from the East back to Europe. He saw a land that could also supply raw materials increasingly in short supply in England, such as timber, ores, and pharmaceuticals. And as a pious Anglican minister, he was eager to convert Indians to Protestantism so that the whole of the New World didn’t fall into Catholic idolatry. Along with salvation for “the souls of millions of those wretched people,” he saw profit in clothing their shamefully naked bodies.

  As well as being a political spy in the garb of a pastor, Hakluyt was on the payroll of the Clothworkers’ Company of London. He was part of an industrial espionage effort to bribe Turkish and Persian officials to learn about their superior dyeing techniques so they could be copied in England. Cloth was England’s prime export—one commentator in 1580 called it the land’s “true golden fleece”—and thousands of spinners and weavers depended heavily on foreign markets. By the early 1580s, with the country increasingly a religious pariah across much of Europe, businesses were desperate to find new customers outside the Catholic sphere. Hakluyt saw the ill-clad peoples of eastern North America as a large and untapped market that could turn around the ailing industry.